Letter to the editor: Regarding checking the facts

I appreciate the dialog on health care from Doug Fausett (Aug. 18, 2009, Sun Advocate), and the additional comments from Joan Piercy on (Aug. 26 , 2009, Sun Advocate). It is a real blessing to have the freedom of expression in this great land of America.

I try to take Mr. Fausett's admonition to heart and study the issues from the source, and I must confess that trying to make sense out of the House of Representatives proposed health care bill of over one thousand pages is a daunting task.

I can say from experience that when the national government runs things, we go downhill from the private business sector. When I was in Australia, I found, to my dismay that the telephone system was run by the postal service of Australia. The post office over in Australia has some very lovely stamps, but they are not up to the task of keeping the telephones working. I tried one evening to call a friend who lived about four miles away. I tried four different telephone "boxes" and could not get on line. When I found the fifth telephone box that finally was working, I gave up calling because I was only a short distance from my friends home and went directly there.

President Obama has cited the similarity of our Postal System to FedEx and UPS. He, however, failed to mention that FedEx and UPS are privately run and make a profit for their investors each year, while the post office manages to continually operate with huge (billion dollar) deficits.

I have a neighbor who for many years had a very specialized kind of employment. She is an excellent nurse, but found herself being placed in the job of managing the billings and communication with the very involved Medicare system. That became her full time job with several different hospitals. I know of a doctor who finally gave up trying to wrestle with the Medicare billing system and simply refused to treat patients who were going to use Medicare for their insurance. That is a very complicated and expensive way to run health care. I can only guess what would happen if we pass the House Bill for health care. It would be the Medicare headache multiplied to infinity.

Mr. Fausett thought that I was maybe living under a rock. When I crawled out of my hole I found that we still have the best health care in the world, and the World Health Organization has used their statistical bias to favor countries with a government single pay health system, while penalizing the countries with private health insurance.

When we look for someone with outright lies, we should pay close attention to the TV adds about Senator Bennett's bill SB 391. The Club for Growth has been spending tons of money to discredit the bill which supports private health care as an alternative to the single pay Federal government plan. I have a copy of the bill and commentaries relating to it. I find the biggest "outright lie" is that the "club" claims that the Bennett bill will cost $1.2 trillion, while the Congressional Budget Office has reported that the bill will be "revenue neutral" and will add nothing to the deficit. We can't say that about the ObamaCare plan.